Chelsea: Tariq Lamptey earns himself contract and transfer rumours-lite

Tariq Lamptey’s 45 minutes with the first team have been enough to push him into some light transfer and contract rumours. Chelsea should stick to the template that is finally starting to pay off for players like him.

Tariq Lamptey’s career is progressing nicely. At age 19 he has made his first team and Premier League debut (the seventh such player under Frank Lampard), and on the basis of those topping off his soon-to-be concluded youth career he is now up for a contract renewal with Chelsea amid interest from Ligue 1’s Nice.

Chelsea have made a lot of changes to their youth development pipeline over the last year, from whittling the loan army to actually connecting the pipeline to the first team. Lamptey is the perfect candidate to enter the reformed loan system to ensure a fruitful senior career at Chelsea or elsewhere. The Blues should do for him what they have done for several others and sign him to a long-term contract and then send him on loan to a top five league.

Lamptey is a right back who looked in his last appearance like he could also play as right wing or right wing-back. This puts him in the unenviable position of being behind Reece James in the club’s long-term depth chart.

Lamptey cannot expect many first team minutes over the next few seasons while the Blues still have Cesar Azpilicueta, nor can he expect a place as a starter with James at the club.

His best option for the short- to medium-term, then, is to go play first-team football somewhere else. While there, he can either work on playing in a different position where he can have a better chance of earning his way into the Chelsea XI; or raise his transfer value as a right back so he can compete with James and have a satisfying fall-back option.

This is a case where Chelsea could use a strong relationship with a club like Vitesse. Even though they are not in a “big five” league, they provided about that level of value; and they were a stepping stone to better or more directly transferable leagues (such as the Championship, as Mason Mount showed).

Without Vitesse as Chelsea “B,” Petr Cech and the rest of the development staff need to sketch out the next few years of Lamptey’s career.

A year or two in the Bundesliga or La Liga plus a year or two in the Championship will put Lamptey in prime position to challenge for a spot with Chelsea in three years, when Cesar Azpilicueta will be fully out of the picture. Depending on how Lamptey develops, he will then be able to challenge Reece James for the starting spot (a hefty challenge to be sure), slot in elsewhere in the XI or push for a high-value transfer to a top-tier club where he can become an immediate starter.

That this is even a conversation is a testament to how well Frank Lampard, Petr Cech and the rest have turned things around over the last few months.

Not long ago, Tariq Lamptey would have been looking to follow players like Jonathan Panzo and Harvey St. Clair out the door to teams like Monaco or Venezia, just to have an outside chance of doing something at the first-team level. Instead, he is the topic of speculation about contract extensions and transfer rumours.

Given his limited involvement this season, Chelsea should have a relatively easy time signing him to a relatively standard four- or five-year deal. These are not major transfer rumours. Because of his age, the fee would be set by a tribunal, not what Nice is willing to pay. He is not in a position to embroil the club in a Callum Hudson-Odoi situation, which is now bleeding over into the Tammy Abraham and Reece James situations.

The Blues can pull from their old template of announcing a new contract and loan on the same day, but this time with all parties involved realistically optimistic that Lamptey will come back to a future at Stamford Bridge.